Guanxi

There is a thing in China that you build with the people around you or that you build with people before you get down to business.  That thing is called Guanxi (pronounced Guan-shee).  Guanxi means "relationship" or "back door", like you have a good enough relationship so you don't need to use the front door anymore, you can use the back one.  When you have Guanxi with the family that owns a restaurant or a shop clerk, you get better service.  Like I said earlier its also important to create Guanxi before business, that way you become friends before you become business partners.

Last Wednesday night I was invited to a dinner with some men from the recording studio at Southwest University.  They had invited four of us (two females and two males) to have a festive dinner at a fancy Chinese restaurant.  Eventually they wanted to have us come into their studio and do some English dialogue recordings for one the areas middle school English departments.  Of course I felt compelled to accept the invitation despite my suffering from a bit of travelers diarrhea.  What I was worried about was the amount of alcohol that you must consume during this Guanxi building arrangement (when building Guanxi for business, usually there is a lot of alcohol being consumed in the process).  Upon arrival to the restaurant, we were escorted to a private dinner party room.  At first we ordered several cold appetizer dishes and of course baijiu and beers.  Baijiu is a chinese liquor that they make by fermenting and then distilling rice and the alcohol can range from 50-70% alcohol.  Even knowing that I was not going to get out of drinking a lot of baijiu, I requested to just drink Coke with the meal.  And like I expected my request was rejected by one of the smirking Chinese men.  The meal consisted of dozens of dishes, many wine glasses of baijiu and beer and toast after toast of the recorders thanking us for coming to dinner and us thanking them for dinner.  After the meal, the smoking of cigarettes began.  Now I am not a cigarette smoker, but I have learned that it is important to be culturally sensitive at certain times, building Guanxi being one of them.  I pretended to smoke and blew smoke rings and had many good conversations, after all everyone had just consumed quite a bit of alcohol.  I definitely thank my genetics and my college drinking experience to get me through situations like this.  Finally, right before we left, we had one last toast, "After today, we are friends".